Towards A Culture Of Golden Age Statesmanship

In “A Theory of Ideological Inertia in Institutions“, we developed a feel for how ideology and organizational culture interplays with the fate of serious, long-term political institutions. Let’s review some major points:

• Ideology is a powerful mode of organization that can transcend and smooth over the raw incentive structure of an institution. Thus, a movement with a strong constructive ideology grows stronger over time, and a movement that is only organized opportunistically decays into chaos.

• Ideology is sometimes more determined by what kind of ethos your movement actually practices than what you profess. For example, Lenin’s revolutionary communist party spent its time usurping legitimate authority, and was thus full of revolutionary communists who were interested in and used to usurping legitimate authority. Seems tautological, but it was important and neglected enough to cause them trouble later on.

• It’s hard to pivot ideology. A political movement full of thieves, revolutionaries, and warlords who only believe in plunder or revolution will not somehow transform into a stable and virtuous aristocracy once it achieves power. Institutions tend to retain their ideological character over time in the absence of large internal struggles. Stalin inherited a state composed of people whose actual ideology was revolution and disloyalty, which was what they had been doing. Hence the purges.

So, let’s apply this to neoreaction:

First of all, what is our aim? We want to replace the current power structure of the United States with something much more secure, effective, and responsible that can bring about a golden age of civilization. Here we will be assuming that we ourselves build the ideological tradition and organization that will engineer this Restoration. We should also plan for the possibility of an indirect assistive contribution. But either way, our aim is Restoration.

Ideology, like so much else, is social technology; it is related but separate from our aims, made of understandable parts and subject to design. To be clear, what we mean by ideology: it is our ethos, our tradition, our institutional culture, our worldview, our operating system, our way of acting and thinking. It is a set of perspectives, behaviors, attitudes, ideas, personalities, and virtues that add up to the telos of our institutions. What we call “ideology” is what Plato was trying to shape with the strict education of the Guardians in “Republic”.

As a social technology, we must consider whether our ideology is well-suited for its task. It is not necessarily even aimed at the proper task of responsible government, let alone effective at it. The ideology of Lenin’s revolutionaries, to use the example again, was primarily suited for left-wing revolution, not good government, never mind whether their aims were any good. Especially as the project grows beyond the direct personal will of a few men to be instead the collective behavior of a larger group, whether the ideology of that group is well-suited to and effective at its task becomes of prime importance.

A good thought experiment to kick off our discussion is this: imagine we were thrust into the seat of sovereign responsibility as we are now, with our current effective ideology and organizational culture. What would be the result of a group of your average influential shitposters and armchair Führers in control of America’s vast state powers and nuclear arsenal? There’s no point getting too deep into imaginary detail, but suffice it to say, I think it wouldn’t be good.

We would act without much care or strategy, or be afraid to act at all. We would occasionally read and keep up with the news, but not really systematically seek the knowledge we need. We would get lazy and distracted by the personal trappings of power, and then blame the Jews and communists when we fail.

This is unacceptable. The current state of our ideology is inadequate for serious responsibility. If we’re going to be strict, it is inadequate even for any project that aims at Restoration.

But what ideological ethos do we want for this project, if what we’re doing is inadequate? For this, let’s work backwards from our goal: we want a golden age order, a hegemonic Anglo-American Imperium that is secure, effective, and responsible, instead of decaying like the current order into insecure, dissipated government, pointless cultural suicide, and irrational geopolitical antagonism.

Populating this golden age state will be a caste of quiet, professional, golden age statesmen. These statesmen will have a way of looking at the world, a way of working, an ethos of organizational loyalty and flexibility, a detailed understanding of the issues and patterns of their organization, a masterful facility with understanding, gaining, and keeping political power in all forms, total loyalty to their president, and a total loyalty to the aim of bringing golden age civilization to the territory under their charge.

It is that ideology which we want to cultivate in ourselves.

So, we have to build our understanding of the ethos of the golden age statesman, and hold that ideal in our minds as a target to actually live out and strive for, in order that we iron out the bugs and set the right example to drill into the fabric of our community.

Before we get into some detail towards precisely what that ideology looks like for us, let’s briefly discuss how this ideology stuff interfaces with strategy. We’ll look again at the history of the Christian church, which I believe used the kind of strategy that we should be using:

Right from the beginning, the Christians had a very recognizable ideology and operating mode that was precursor to everything that came later. There were no big transitions or revolutions or second phase of the project, only maturation and growth. Right from the beginning, their strategy was roughly: live with virtue, gather together in a hierarchically-organized church to worship God with a liturgical tradition, evangelize the faith to others, think in detail about truth and the nature of it all, etc. They succeeded in retaining the character and living tradition of this ideology over the long-term, and thus the vitality of the organization over the long term, because it was a plan that could start small and zealous, adapt to circumstance, and simply keep doing its thing to grow big and influential.

This is what I call a “one step plan”. The organization and movement retains continuity of fundamental character, growing mostly in scale and maturity, attempting no major phase sequences or other transitions. Even the Christianization of kings and Rome was just a quantitative jump in influence and scale, rather than the milestone start of a new strategy.

In the context of political movements, this avoids the nasty business of turning a bunch of revolutionaries into statesmen right at crux time. Better by far to find a way to make it work by building a culture of statesmanship from the beginning.

Our project is to build an organization and movement of worthy statesmen expert in acquiring and wielding sovereign power, and expert in leading the society under their charge to greatness. This is essentially a deep state or government in exile. So what are the actual patterns of action that make up the behavior of such an organization?

We can describe our one-step strategy in terms of what resources we are seeking, and how we get those things. Strictly speaking this is a strategy, rather than an ideology, but they are very closely related, and ideology is mostly downstream of strategy; believing in and performing these actions well and in accordance with everything we learn along the way will pin down the bulk of our target ideology:

1. Research to build knowledge. Any movement that seriously intends to even advise on political and governance matters, let alone rule well, needs to know a lot about the subject. Most of what we should be doing right now is building and maintaining a collective understanding of all the important parts of history and the modern power landscape, from all the particular important facts to broad sweeping theory and summary. We also need a comprehensive program, from overall goals and strategies down to particular policies and tactical roadmaps. Finally and most importantly, we need the worldview and ethos, knowledge of the Dharma, as they call it in the east, that underlies and motivates the whole project, and contextualizes it in the greater cosmic struggle for life. We should be running more book clubs, study groups, and research teams to produce well-researched and thought-out knowledge in these areas. We should be publishing more of the resulting ideas here on Social Matter and in our private communication groups, to inform and inspire our brothers to build on our work.

2. Organize with others of our mind to build unity and group effectiveness. The left can get away with organizational chaos, but the right needs absolute organizational unity and effectiveness to succeed. The correct image is a laser made out of men. Therefore, find your local brothers, bind yourselves together, and subordinate yourselves to the group, figure out who is your leader and follow him, get good at organizing yourselves and executing projects, subordinate your local group to the larger project and pledge fealty to Hestia’s leadership. Real organization is difficult, especially for the democracy-addled modern mind, but we should strive for perfect organization.

3. Train to become personally worthy as men. The modern man is weak, cowardly, ignorant, materialistic, and dishonorable. We are not the worst offenders in these vices, but our condition is nowhere near acceptable. We need to systematically train ourselves and help our brothers to train to become superior men worthy of leading our civilization into a new golden age. Our organized chapters are where most of this action has to happen, so they should be focused especially on these self-improvement aspects. Measuring our progress as we can, and challenging each other in it, is key to building a culture of improvement.

4. Recruit worthy and zealous men. None of this can happen without a good number of worthy men bent on executing the project. In this, quantity is important, but quality much more so: a single man of superior talent, virtue, wisdom, and zeal can see and do things that no mass of half-interested mediocres can match. When we recruit, we should keep this in mind; find the best men and convince them wholly of the value of our project. In light of the selection and tone-setting effects of visible ideology, recruiting should be done mostly by demonstrating the activities and virtues that make up our one-step strategy (i.e. this list). And again, the zeal for the actual final goal of our project, the golden age of civilization and the culture of statesmanship that gets us there, is the foundation and backup plan for all of the rest of this. Inculcating zeal in recruits, and modelling zeal for them, is therefore one of the most important parts of recruiting.

5. Contribute resources as supporters of the project. Projects like these don’t happen magically; they happen because enough of us dedicate our lives and resources to making them happen. If we’re just here to be entertained with insight porn, there are safer hobbies. If we are interested in this project, it is because we believe it can succeed. If we believe in the project, we should be contributing what we can to make it happen. Even the effective altruists, for all their boring orthodoxy, have hundreds of talented people who donate a large fraction of their income to the cause. We have a handful of men who have dropped everything, moved across the world, and work full-time on this project, but too few who have faith enough to regularly donate their time and money. The best way to contribute money is listed on the donate page. The best way to contribute effort is to get in touch and volunteer to help out with Hestia’s research program.

6. Narrowcast and stay passivist to avoid making unnecessary enemies. Finding ourselves under the hostile gaze of the mass media hate machine, or antagonizing powerful elites, does not contribute to our progress. Further, any powerful enemies we make for ourselves will only make our job harder. Therefore, most of our communication with allies, recruits, and each other, should be private, quiet, and respectful. When we speak publicly, the aim is to rally and inform the curious and the sympathetic without too much bothering anyone else. Narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. Passivism, or territorialism, rather than activism.

7. Network with valuable allies and other organizations. We can’t win by staying entirely among ourselves; we will eventually need to be connected and even allied with most of the elite, and many other key people. Thus, a key activity is having valuable things to offer to potential allies, networking our way to them to offer it, and understanding how we can be useful.

8. Trade with allies. The knowledge and capability necessarily generated by this project is useful to more than just us. Our allies will find it in their interest to help us out with money, information, recruits, more allies, territory, influence, and so on, in exchange for our insights and help. This is one of our most important streams of resources, and a big chunk of our core business, and should be cultivated as much as possible. This is mostly the concern of the organized chapters and Hestia itself.

9. Occupy and govern territory. Ultimately, our aim is to accept power over much of what goes on in the world. But we are not in the business of adversarially seizing power from legitimate authorities. Thinking that way only gets us into the revolutionary trap, where we end up with a movement of revolutionaries and anarchists, and a whole lot of enemies. Instead, our business is building and offering a valuable alternative, making alliances and connections, recieving as much authority as we are worthy of recieving, over whatever territory would benefit from dealing with us. In proper Confucian style, the first territory to rule is our own lives, families, and social circles, where we can make many improvments in lifestyle, organization, piety, and such, and offer a better system of law and insulation from modern political trouble. We can then think about doing similar for our local churches, univeristy campuses, hobby and community groups, and even small towns. The aim here is not to directly challenge the Cathedral for social or political power, but to find out-of-the-way chunks of territory of especial value to ourselves that we can occupy, govern, and improve to develop our expertise. Obviously we will have to scale beyond backwaters to larger chunks of territory like USG, but that’s beyond scope of this article. For now, let us focus on our immediate social territory.

So, we should be planning and executing projects that contribute to and exercise the above, as well as constantly checking our actual operational mode against our aims. Doing so, and making these activities the primary cultural mode of our group, pushes us in the right direction ideologically. It solidifies us in a mode that will actually work in the long-term and can actually grow into our desired form.

Our desired form is essentially a deep state. A deep state is the actual ruling substructure of a state that is capable of regrowing the state after a defeat, maneuvering to assimilate any new centers of power, and solidifying its own hold on the state. Let’s check that the above prescribed action patterns are not just appropriate now, but also for the state after Restoration:

1. Research. A strong ethos of figuring out the nature of power, tracking the landscape of power in the world, and formulating strategy and policy that aligns with Dharma is very much among the core activities of the state. The state needs to keep an eye on its domain, understand the larger context of its task, and act with foresight. These require almost exactly the same research that we need pre-Restoration.

2. Organizational unity. Good organizational discipline, hierarchy, initiative, unity of action, and so on, are very important to a state.

3. Training. If the statesmen of the new order are obsessively dissatisfied with lack of virtue and wisdom, and have a culture of training constantly to become more worthy, this can only be a good thing for the long term health of their civilization.

4. Recruiting the best into the ideology. There is no doubt that a state will need to recruit the best elements of society and train them in its culture and methods. And if the state is to last a long time, which requires ideological zeal, this will also have to be an almost spiritual initiation, whereby the new men become fully committed in their hearts to the goals of the institution. The only thing that changes on Restoration is the economics of the thing: before, it is an uphill battle against the gradient of immediate power to convince and recruit the best men. After, it is an uphill battle against the gradient of power to fortify the recruitment process against the insincere power seeker and admit only the great men. This is a big change, but manageable with planning and foresight.

5. Personally contributing. Before Restoration, we are all contributing large chunks of our effort and capital as investment in the project. After Restoration, the state, and the larger project, will become financially solvent and will no longer need investment. If the men involved continue with an ethos of personal contribution, that is not a problem.

6. Passivism and narrowcasting. These prescriptions rule out the attention seeking, mob-based, presumptuous, and adversarial political mode for a more cooperative, constructive, quiet, elite, strategic, and private political mode, which will definitely need to be in the operational vocabulary of a responsible state. However, these prescriptions alone may allow a mode that is fearful of or not willing to use open force, broadcast propaganda, or authority. We will have to gain those skills by other means.

7. Networking. The state needs to be socially connected to most of the powerful elite in society, to be able to negotiate with them to get things done efficiently. This is exactly the same before and after, except that again the power and status gradient changes from pushing away from us before Restoration to towards us after Restoration.

8. Trading with allies. Being able to offer useful favors to allies in exchange for cooperation of various kinds is a key business of the state. Of course, everything is always backed by the absolute authority of the Crown, but doing most things by negotiation, and falling back to authority only in the most important and stubborn deals, keeps it smooth and friendly. The art of the deal is a critical piece of statecraft, both before and after Restoration.

9. Occupying and governing territory. Maintaining and expanding power, and governing the occupied territory, is of course the core business of a state. The only thing that changes at Restoration is the scale of owned territory. We will have to think and plan with some care to navigate this discontinuity in scale.

Some of these have to change a bit as we scale; we almost certainly will need to pick up new ideological patterns along the way to cope with the greater responsibility of sovereignty, and we have here only covered part of the total content of our target ideological culture, but we have eliminated any necessity for major breaches in organizational tradition at Restoration and defined a major fraction of the continuous culture between our project pre-Restoration and post. The remaining small misalignments between optimal culture pre and post-Restoration are dwarfed by the other challenges ahead of us.

To review, ideology, or organizational culture, or operational tradition, or whatever we want to call it, is a major and important driver of the success or failure of long-term institutions. Due to its stickiness, we need to now be thinking and moving towards the ideology we will need post-Restoration, otherwise our operation explodes on Restoration into dysfunction and purges. Our long-term target for ideology is necessarily that of the quiet, professional, golden age statesman, as described above. Our big bet here is that a cabal of such golden age statesmen in the possession of the absolute truth of the goodness of their cause will a) eventually become worthy enough to accept power, and b) be able to securely, efficiently, and responsibly rule that territory and lead our civilization into a new golden age.

Liked it? Take a second to support Social Matter on Patreon!